


The Winter Soldier Brief

by keire_ke



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27946385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke
Summary: Bucky's looking forward to grading the assignment he prepared for his students (a semi-fictional overview of an alternative history of SHIELD), when his sister calls with the worst news: his roommate has died in a car crash while driving Bucky's car. It's not the police that comes looking for him, however, and Bucky soon finds himself on the run. Out of options, he turns to the one person who might help to untangle the mystery of who might want to shoot a political science PhD: Captain America. However, finding the man is just the beginning, and Bucky is definitely in over his head.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers
Comments: 58
Kudos: 132
Collections: Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020





	1. The thesis

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely based on _The Pelican Brief_.

The most surprising thing to learn about political science is how close it's tied to the arts and crafts community. It is a field of study chiefly focused on trends so broad they move nations, and yet so many of them are best expressed using colorful threads, which is why Bucky is presently handing over his credit and loyalty cards to Meghan, the Crafter In Chief, per her employee badge.

"Wall of crazy getting an upgrade?" she asks, nodding at the bundle of threads in five colors, a sheet of gold and silver stars, a box of pins and two sheets of felt he's got piled on the counter.

"Yeah, planning a whole new section," Bucky says proudly. He has long since stopped caring his students call it that. With age comes perspective and all that.

"Exam-grade sections?" she asks as she flutters her eyelashes. "Anything in particular? I always thought green is a good color for the healthcare debate."

Bucky laughs. "Nice try!" Another thing he's managed to let go is letting Meghan in on his color-coordination thoughts; she had an unfortunate insight into how his brain worked where threads were concerned. He'd nearly handed her the answers to his autumn quizzes by accident, that time he was stocking up in beads.

"Aw, come on! You're the only professor shopping here, where else am I going to get my scoops?"

"I told you before: you want top secret intel from the wall of crazy, get it at the source."

"Can't," Meghan says, pouting. "I've most classes on the other side of campus, and your office hours don't overlap with my off-work schedule."

"That sucks." Bucky bites his lip. His office hours  _ were _ all over the place this semester. "Tell you what – come by my office any time I'm not in class, I'll make an exception for you. I'm in until seven on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, will that work?"

Meghan's whole face lights up. "Thanks!"

"Not a word to anyone else though, I need my alone time to work on the wall," he says with a wink, grabs his wallet, the paper bag filled with his purchases, and skips out of the store.

He takes the scenic route on his way back, grabs a coffee along the way, and rolls into his office ready to start the day. His first class isn't until noon, so he's got a nice long while to work out exactly how to apply his purchases to the wall.

It is, objectively, a good wall. He'd spent a whole long afternoon pinning a layer of cork to where originally there was a bookshelf, and now the wall served as a reason most of his students bothered to come to his office hours. Snippets of paper covered it, floor-to-ceiling: printouts, newspaper shreds, and threads, dozens of threads, connecting the papers, pins, and post-its.

There is a rumor, shared between students who take his classes, that the entire setup is in fact a ruse, and part of his conspiracy lectures, designed to confuse and throw them off track. The rumor was broadly untrue, at least as far as the blues, the yellows, the pinks, the cyans and the oranges went.

There maybe was an item or two Bucky out there just to screw with everyone, he's not admitting anything.

He shakes out the contents of the paper bag, drops his wallet into the pile, and inspects the newly purchased threads. Meghan was not wrong: green was indeed for his healthcare module. Blue was for the election cycle and campaigns, orange for the Middle East: good thing the shop had a selection of shades, else even he would have been lost in the spiderweb. The green has bits of silver in it, just to highlight the ACA mess; god knows someone has to. 

For now, the entire bundle gets swiped into a drawer. He picks up the plum-purple thread and unrolls a length. Purple is for his never-to-be-written political espionage novel, which definitely isn't Captain America fanfiction, or, as he explains it to his students, his Conspiracies in Modern Politics lesson plan. The purple thread travelled with him from his junior year, and was one of the first things he put on the wall's predecessor: a plain IKEA cork board. Back before Everett, his office-mate, retired and took his creaky bookshelves with him, when he still had to confine himself to three square feet, the purple has been the start of his career as a spinner of perfectly legitimate political conspiracy theories he now got to call lesson plans, and occasionally accurate predictions. He was attached to the purple.

Although it's hard to tell at first glance, the picture of Steve Rogers, as he was before the serum, occupies a place of honor, second only to his arrest record and the headline proclaiming his disappearance. From there the purple thread curls around an article on his reappearance, and follows to an encoded confirmation he worked for SHIELD now.

It took Bucky a whole entire affair to be privy to that information. He regrets nothing, and doesn't even want acknowledgement for the promotion his insights ensured for Agent Matthews. They were well-earned.

He  _ would _ like some credit for accurately predicting Captain America's return from the dead in the political espionage novel he wrote as an undergrad. Maybe if he gets tired of being a teacher he could get a job at Fox or something, and get paid for peddling conspiracies, and then he'd be able to sue the man himself for copyright infringement. Granted, he did not predict the aliens, but hey – who would have?

His phone gives a half-hearted buzz in his pocket, and Bucky frowns at it. Just an email alert. Weird. Rob was supposed to call by now, considering Bucky sent him no less than three very annoyed texts about disappearing in the middle of the night with Bucky's car keys and car. Asshat used the car more than Bucky did, though fair's fair, he did pay for the gas, every time, and pitched in for insurance, too. He was by far the best roommate Bucky's ever had: all the rent, very little cohabitation, which was why Bucky was willing to share the car as much as he did.

Not that he won't be relieved when Rob's girlfriend finally moves to the city and they get an apartment together. He's got all this salary to spend, now that he's finally a full PhD, and he's always dreamed of living alone. Maybe he'll finally get a cat.

Sure was weird for Rob to be out this long though. It was nearing midday, and Bucky left a very annoyed note on the counter and on Rob's door, to boot.

He frowned at the phone for a couple more seconds, before putting it aside. He probably forgot. It's not like Bucky never forgot to call back.

* * *

His phone rings when he's in the middle of printing out a carefully selected bunch of excerpts from a SHIELD agent's report he's acquired through covert means of having the dumb luck of buying a beer for their payrol specialist awhile back, and then getting himself dumped totally by accident by means of introducing them to one of his colleagues. They were married now, and Bucky had an in at one of the most covert agencies in the world, so: he's cool with it.

The phone does not take "ignore" for an answer, as whoever it is keeps at it, ring after ring. Bucky picks it up absentmindedly – just like Becca, to call in the middle of a workday, he could be in class! – and holds up the page the printer just spat out.

"Hey, what's up?"

"Bucky!"

Thanks for the shattered eardrum, sis. "Stop yelling, I'm at work."

"Bucky," she cries again, and this time he feels a trickle of concern.

"Are you okay? Becca, what happened?"

"They just—they said you died!"

The paper flutters to the floor. "What?"

A series of long, drawn breaths, rocks the speaker, followed by a snort of a nose being blown. When Becca speaks again, she is under control. "The police just called. Your car hit a tree and caught fire, they found a body. They think it's you."

Bucky manages to hold on to the phone, but only just. Rob. Fuck. His knees buckle, and his skull is spared a collision with the floor solely because the chair is right there. "Rob took the car last night. He drives it most of the time. I found his ID on the counter today, he must have forgotten to take it. Holy shit. Rob."

On the other end he hears Becca sigh in relief and then draw a sharp breath. "I'm so sorry, Bucky."

"I'm gonna… I'm gonna need a minute." Rob was… Rob is dead. "Becca – I'm okay. In case they call mom and dad, or Beth and Bee." Shit, he really hopes they didn't call all three of his sisters. "Tell them I'm okay."

"Of course. Of course, Bucky. Take care of yourself. Call me again in an hour, please."

"I will. Take care, Becca."

Fuck. 

The phone slips out of his hand, hits the desk and falls flat. Bucky swipes it into the drawer with his elbow, and stands. He walks out of the office, wobbling, hips and shoulders swaying to compensate for the warm jello he has for knees at the moment, feet striking the floor at uneven intervals, one, two, maybe three, or maybe five, but he makes it into the bathroom down the hall. 

Fuck. Rob, goddamn it.

The water splashes against the sink, and his wrist, spraying the floor and his side. It's cold; he bends to the stream, takes a sip and lets it flow over his face, down his chin. His reflection stares back at him when he dares to look up: pale, wide-eyed, droplets of water clinging to the stubble. 

They thought he was dead, they found a body in his car and thought it was him.

Rob is. Bucky splashes more cold water onto his face and tries to count as he inhales. In, hold, out, stop fucking shaking. The slipper sides of the sink offer little resistance as he sinks down and breathes, forehead pressed against the cold porcelain.

Shit.

Thankfully the classes are still in session, so the corridors are empty when he makes his way back to the office. He drops into his chair and stares numbly at the colors floating across his screen.

Huh.

He could have sworn he was in the bathroom long enough for the screen to go to sleep, but then time doesn't exactly feel real right now. The colors turn back into the oceanscape he's got on his lock screen, the empty password box hovering just over the cosy little cottage, framed by firs. He writes two emails: one to the dean, begging for an emergency time off, and then another to his class. "Sorry guys," he says to himself, then adds the same sentiment just above the signature. "I'll make it up to you."

He should probably contact the police. Or maybe not. First go back home, find Rob's ID, then to the police. Yeah, that seems about right. He closes the laptop and shoves it into his backpack, takes a photo of his wall out of habit, and walks out of the office, locking the door behind him.

What a fucking day.

The sun is out, beaming down at the campus with unfair cheeriness, which is probably why there're a bunch of small groups hanging around any wall protrusion that can be sat on. He rushes through the more populous areas, past a group of obvious freshmen and a serious scientific conference, before he runs into a group that looks vaguely familiar. Bucky recognises a couple of them – the chubby blond, reaching into their pocket for the phone, is in his 101 class. Bucky ducks his head before they can look up and spot him; the street is in sight, and with it the anonymity of being just another pedestrian. Chatting is the last thing he needs right now, which is probably why his phone chooses this exact moment to try and ring its ass off. He curses, delves into his pocket, but it must have caught on a lint or something, because it slips through his fingers. Bucky stops and rocks back on his heel, trying to dislodge, and as he does a car comes to a screeching halt, a hair away from the curb and his toes.

"Watch it!" Bucky yells, hand coming up to slap the driver window. Stupid fucker. "You could have hit someone!"

The guy inside stares at him like he wants to say something, but fuck it, asshole nearly hit him. Bucky just gives him the finger and stalks away into the opposite direction. Fucking hell, people drive like assholes.

The pavement is sliding smoothly under his feet as he walks. It's soothing, meditative almost. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, let your mind wander within acceptable limits, he tells himself, and don't think about Rob.

An ambulance passes him, casually rolling down the street. Bucky rubs a hand against his eyes. Was there an ambulance when Rob hit that tree? Could they have saved him? Where did it happen, anyway?

No, don't think about Rob! Or his car.

Fuck, was it the breaks? He's been meaning to have a look at the car, when was the last time he got it serviced properly, beyond an oil change? It was in good shape, right? Good enough to be driven?

When was the last time he drove it? He would have noticed if something was off?

No, he wouldn't, he knows very little about cars. Even if the car stopped in the middle of the road, he wouldn't have realized.

Shit, he doesn't even know what happened.

He stops and pulls out his phone. One missed call, unknown number. Whatever. Should he call Rebecca and ask what happened? Seems like an asshole move. Would she even know? Would the police have told her? No, he'll find out, probably, when he goes to the police. And he's going to. He is. He just… he needs a moment.

Bucky shoves the phone deep into his pocket and takes a deep breath. He should go home. Yeah, he should go home. Rob left his papers, he can take them and go to the police.

Hell, maybe the whole thing has been a massive misunderstanding, and Rob is actually home, and they will laugh about it over beer next week. Maybe not next week, but soon. The important thing is he needs to go talk to someone, before the police start calling his parents with the news.

He really hopes Becca called them first.

He makes his way to the bus stop and he's in luck: his bus is rounding the corner. He hops on and a couple of stops later he is out and descending into the metro station. It's a route so familiar he practically sleepwalks through the process: scan the card, get onto the train, snooze while hanging off of the railing, count down the stops in the back of his mind while swaying with every lurch on the tracks.

Of course on normal days he doesn't imagine the screech of metal and his poor Prius wrapped around a tree, with his roommate dying in it.

Bucky startles. His hand trembles on the pole, his chest is heaving; his body feels like he's not in it, and something is trying to get in instead. There's not enough air in the car, not enough oxygen, even though he's trying, desperately, to get it into his lungs, one meagre mouthful at a time.

The train screeches to a halt and he bolts, pushing aside a couple of nice kids, and sprints out onto the street. He finds a lamppost to hold on to and breathes, breathes, breathes, until his heart settles and he no longer feels like he's drowning. Only then does he let go of the cool metal and shrugs at the bodega owner across the street, who is staring at him like he's just lost his mind.

The sky is a little less blue than it was over campus, though that might just be his mood. He's a few stations away from his usual stop; he needs to get back into the train. He straightens, squares his shoulders, pats his pockets to make sure his phone is still there, and realizes he managed to leave his wallet in the office.

Shit, he must have brushed it into the drawer when he was emptying out the bag of supplies.

He's gonna need that ID…

Which is he going to need more, his or Rob's? Probably his own.

"Goddamn it, Bucky," he mutters to himself, but he's only managed to last one stop before bolting, so it's probably easiest to get back to campus, first.

Luckily the classes are in session when he makes it to his office, so no one bothers him when he unlocks the door and—

What the fuck happened to his wall?

Bucky stares at the blank expanse of wall where his cork and the meticulously chosen articles, clippings and notes used to be. There's the stain he forgot was there, but where were his post-its? His threads? His ill-gotten secret memos?

"What the fresh fuck," he says to no one in particular, strides to his desk and pulls the drawer open. His wallet is still there, nestled among the colorful threads, and so is the university-sponsored printer, so it's not like he was robbed. Who'd want to rob a PhD's office, anyway. Probably a prank by the PhDs from the other institute. "Back burner," he says out loud. "Rob first."

He stuffs the wallet into his backpack, locks the office again and walks out the building. He pauses when he reaches the corner of the building. Did he get everything? What else could the police want, he's got an ID, everything else should be in the system, right? He hesitates, his foot slips on a curb and he stumbles, and in that very same moment a sharp crack sounds just behind him. His cheek begins to burn, a sharp, sudden pain, like he's been struck with a piece of gravel.

His fingers, when he brings them up to his face, come away wet with blood. He's got no idea what compels him, but he jerks his whole body back, into the safety of the archway that hides the door from the elements, just as another crack splits a brick at roughly the same height as his head.

Bucky presses his back against a wall and stares at the wall opposite. What the fuck.

What the fuck.

Those look like bullet holes.

Those are goddamned bullet holes.

Someone is fucking shooting at him.

What the actual fuck.

His phone is ringing again. Becca. He answers it reflexively. "Can't talk right now," he says and disconnects, turns around, and starts running.

Someone is fucking shooting at him!

A switch flips somewhere in his brain, switching it off. Bucky takes off; he skids around a corner, comes face to side with a black SUV, pirouettes around a lamp post, and runs in the direction the SUV came from. He needs to—fuck, he needs to get out of here.

He dives through an alley and – bless – into a crowd of excitable freshmen, where he reverses direction again. They enter a building, and he goes with the flow, splitting from the group as soon as a convenient nook allows, and takes off down the corridor.

He turns the corner when he hears the boots. Way too heavy to be students, though a quick glance tells him they sure would like to pretend they are. They waste time looking into classrooms though, so they probably did not see him run around the corner, what the fuck does that tell you, Bucky?

His brain comes online: the phone.

Bucky stares at the message on the screen, wordlessly begs Becca, Beth and Bee to forgive him, and switches the phone off. They can only track a switched-off phone to the last place it made contact with a cell tower, right?

But hang on, there was this thing a few years back… Bucky clenches his eyes shut. There was the story in WaPo last year, NSA was tracking phones even when off, but it wasn't default. They needed to get the right software on it, first. He should ditch the phone, just to be safe, who knows what technology they have, not even the sky's the limit now.

He may need the phone later, though.

It feels impossibly heavy in his hand, but he puts it back in his pocket. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding, he tells his paranoid brain. He'll need it to tell his family he's fine, as soon as he gets out.

A quick look tells him the pack of goons is getting closer. Thankfully he remembers this building well enough – next right and there's an inconspicuous fire exit. He's going to skip that one, too obvious. Instead, he'll take the left, walk as calmly as he can with a heart rate of what feels like 300, and he'll leave via the Eastern entrance. Now he's only got to hope they didn't bring enough men to cover all possible egresses at the same time.

He pulls the elastic band out of his hair as he walks and shakes it out. That will fool people for approximately fifteen seconds, so he digs into his backpack for his reading glasses. Okay, glasses, hair, he can't ditch the jacket right now, because he will die of the frosty April breeze, but he can keep the backpack off his back, hopefully that's gonna do something. Fingers crossed. He's got five bucks in his pocket, but there's an ATM right next to the door.

Problem is, he won't have much time from the moment he puts his card in the machine, when they're already tracking his phone. On the flipside, he will need cash. Credit card transactions are too easy to track, and it's a harsh unforgiving capitalist world. 

He chances it: the machine spits out $300, he stuffs the bunch of twenties into his pocket, and walks out onto the street.

One of the City Tour buses is passing by. Bucky runs and makes it in the nick of time, hoping like hell no one will bother to check his ticket, and just in time – as they turn a corner he can see two guys who are definitely not students rush out of the building, turn their back on the bus, and stare at the ATM.

* * *

He ditches the bus on the very next stop, cut through an alley and out into a busy street. What now?

He's alone, as alone as a man can be in a big city. The spike of adrenaline leaves him, and he hugs his backpack to his chest. His hair is stuck to his cheek, his cheek hurts, he's wheezing, and also what the fuck, once more.

He should go to the police. Yes. Okay.

Only… he stops in the middle of the sidewalk and stares off into space. If he shows up at the police station and shows his ID, won't that tell the goons exactly where he is? Who even were they? This being DC it could be anyone, but why would anyone want to get him specifically?

What would be the point?

He needs to go to the police and demand protection. Yes. That's the thing. He can worry about the why later.

He pulls out his phone, his thumb over the on button and hesitates. He turned it off for a reason. The nearest precinct is… fuck, his phone is off. So not only is he down a way of calling the police, he also has basically no way of knowing where they are.

There has to be another way. There must be a payphone or something.

Stupid twenty-first century, no goddamned payphones anywhere in sight.

He finds one eventually; a sad relict of the past, a little beat up payphone, hanging in an equally unloved phone booth, which smelled very strongly of someone so desperate to take a leak, they ignored the total lack of privacy the doorless booth offered.

A quick pat down and a rummage through his backpack reveals no disinfectant, which almost makes him reconsider. How much danger is he in, really? Enough to justify touching the handle? Maybe it's just a misunderstanding. What if he goes to the police and they tell him he's being paranoid?

Someone scrawled "fuck the police" over the phone, which: fair. Bucky's not loving this plan, either. But he needs to get this straightened out. Even if he is being paranoid, Rob is dead. He owes it to him to straighten it out. 

"911, what's your emergency?"

"I got a call my roommate died in a car crash this morning, and now someone's following me," he says. 

The lady on the other end doesn't miss a beat. "Are you in danger right now?"

"I might be? I saw a couple of guys follow me, but I managed to lose them."

"Stay on the line, I will alert the nearest patrol car. They should be with you in a couple of minutes."

Okay. The police know where he is, they'll be here in a minute. The lady on the phone rattles off helpful suggestions, but Bucky's staring at the impromptu graffiti just over the machine, and a matching acronym directly over the keypad. 

The guys were at the ATM seconds after he left.

He hangs up.

Ninety seconds is not a lot of time. Bucky crosses the street and gets into a cab, moments before a couple of black SUVs screech onto the scene, converging on the payphone. 

Those sure as fuck are not the police, he thinks as his fingers clench against his thighs. He turns his face away, hoping none of the agents look at the traffic around them, as the cab slowly peels away.

Goddamn it, what if they did. 

"Stop the car!" he yells, throws the door open, and, despite the driver yelling, leaps out onto the street. Are there any cameras here? Shouldn't be, it's not a great alley. Bucky takes off, crosses the street and through a courtyard, comes out on the other end just in time to dive into another cab.

"I'm not paranoid," he tells himself.

The driver turns his way. "What?"

"Nevermind, West End, please."

The cab drops him off next to the Blue Duck Tavern. Bucky shakes his head, walks into a Starbucks opposite, pays for a large latte in cash and sits down to think. He's as safe as he's going to be in the next five minutes, or at least that's the lie he's going to tell himself.

He pulls out his laptop and boots it up.

Okay. Okay. Think, Bucky. Why are goons after you? You pirated some movies in your college days, and Disney is getting a little too jealous of its properties these days, even for Disney, but they aren't at the black-ops goon level yet, are they? Maybe Rob was using his car to traffic cocaine? No, that's bullshit, Rob's a good guy. What is it though? Someone was trying to get at his computer, so it should be something that's on his computer, right? Or maybe they don't know what he did, and are just fishing. But if that's the case, why shoot first?

Bucky opens a blank document, inserts a table, and drums his fingers against his cup. What are the facts?

One: his roommate is dead. He writes that down. In the second column he writes: second-hand information. Someone called Rebecca and told her Bucky was dead, so something definitely happened there, Rob usually texted when he got back, to let him know where he parked, and Becca was his first emergency contact. He adds a third column: this is unconfirmed, but plausible.

Two, someone was looking for him at the university. Bucky didn't exactly wait to get the badge numbers, but from the looks of the guy – buff, grim, focused, short hair, heavy boots, yeah, he was some kind of an agent, and given the lack of suit probably not the kind that follows clues. So that checks out. No insignia that Bucky saw, but again, he only saw them from a distance. Confirmed.

Three, someone shot at him. Maybe? Bucky touched his cheek, which definitely hurt, and a bunch of matted hair seemed caked there, but it wasn't like he knew for sure there was shooting. If he was shot in the face, he would have noticed, right? No amount of shock would get him this far.

He hisses when the skin stretched a touch too far, and yeah, okay, that is blood. Injury confirmed, shooting… possible. It could have also been a drive-by piece of gravel. It could have been a pebble falling from a height, too. 

He stares at the words on the screen, then very tentatively adds "a car almost hit me". That's number four. It could have been an accident, so he marks it as "possible".

Item five: goons are following him. He called the police and two minutes later unmarked black SUVs rolled onto the street. Maybe the mob has access to emergency lines, but given how little detail he's given to the responder—he hasn't even given his name! Also the mob has no conceivable reason to be after him.

He's an academic. Why the fuck would he be in trouble? 

The only thing he's ever done that's remotely controversial is… well, okay, he has written a bunch of things that might have pissed some Republicans off, but pissing off Republicans these days is as easy as giving candy to a non-white baby. 

He taps at the keys aimlessly, flipping between the windows, and then his brain screeches to a halt and he flips through them again, pausing on an open folder.

It can't be.

"SHIELD is compromised," he whispers to himself, and flicks to the abstract he was drafting just the other day. "The opaque structures and finances of one of the most secretive government agencies make it the perfect target for long-term covert infiltration. The systematic penetration of hostile ideology at the lower ranks influences the long-term planning and goals, eventually culminating in the upper echelons turning towards methods and endgame contrary to initial, and declared, aims."

It kind of fits, doesn't it? They are more secretive than the CIA, and aside from the key figures it's really hard to pin down the actual structure. Their training programs are top secret. The financing is a literal black hole. Their name has "homeland" in it, but from Bucky's been able to tell they seem to spend a lot of time meddling abroad. They started off as a science division that performed experiments on humans, and then they actually hired Nazis in its early days. It's like whoever put it together desperately wanted to make sure no one will be able to tell which way is up.

It has to be SHIELD. He's got some not entirely legally obtained documents regarding other agencies in his cloud, but even the goddamned CIA wouldn't be kidnapping a white university employee off the streets because of a couple of somewhat secret domestic expense reports.

So it has to be SHIELD, even though that's insane. Who would want to infiltrate them? 

Well, okay, anybody. It can't be interagency play, because frankly all they needed to do to keep Bucky quiet is send a sternly-worded letter without misspelling the name of the agency in the logo. He'd have made it a footnote in his lesson plan, at most.

More importantly, how desperately do they need to keep it a secret and how does Bucky keep himself from getting shot?

He mulls this over. He needs to take this to someone in SHIELD, someone who will not be easily dismissed, someone with sufficient clout to put this to an end. Someone who, at the same time, is not actually involved in whatever the fuck is happening.

So. All he needs to do now is find someone within an intelligence agency, someone who is, at the same time, high enough in status to command respect of their fellow agents, in case there was infighting, and principled enough to be willing to expose a potential conspiracy, even though they might themselves be complicit.

"I am so fucked," Bucky says, earning a scoff from the barista.

He blinks, then leans forward. The barista is wearing a pin of an American flag on her left shoulder. A metaphorical purple thread unfolds in his brain, wraps around the pin, loops back and zooms through his brain to the folder labeled "The Winter Soldier Brief", his one attempt to break through into the literary world via popular fiction.

Captain America works for SHIELD.

What are the odds Captain America is involved in the kind of conspiracy that shoots at teachers, he asks himself, and well, he does work for SHIELD, doesn't he, so high. 

Bucky's case is not exactly air-tight, either. What's he going to say? Listen to me, I think your employer might be a bit of a bastard? The dude signed up to do black ops for the US government, question mark, if he doesn't already know that, he's not gonna be much help!

On the flip side, Bucky's case is also out of options. Walking into a police station at this juncture will likely land him in a black SUV within minutes, judging by the response times, and that will land him in a tiny room without windows with concrete walls and a slot in the door.

Or in a burning car wrapped around a tree.

Captain America it is.

Bucky looks back to his open document.

"Item six: find Captain America," he types and stares at the words for a minute or two.

Well, this should be easy.


	2. The proof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life is just an endless string of minor annoyances for Steve. The building is replacing the washing machine in the basement, he's getting paper mail, his apartment is bugged, and a twitchy academic is lecturing him on proper hand-washing technique.

Steve pauses in the lobby, to look through the announcements pinned to the board as he checks his mailbox. Three pizzeria leaflets, one Sichuan cuisine menu he makes a mental note to check out and a small padded envelope with something hard inside, with a postmark from Passadena and a Captain America stamp. Steve frowns at it and puts it in his pocket. He'll have SHIELD run their checks tomorrow.

He throws one last look at the message board and frowns. They're planning to replace one of the washing machines and they want a meeting to discuss the type?

Steve blinks. He's got no issue with the washing machine he has, what kind of machines do they have in the basement? This is a pretty old building, maybe they haven't changed them in a while. He turns on his heel and heads to the basement, suddenly curious just how outdated a washing machine needs to be to get replaced.

"Hi," he hears. Kate, his immediate neighbour, is stuffing a pink shirt into one of the machines. Scrub top, he realises. She's got a basketful of them, all in pale pink – hospitals these days must be a lot more colorful if the nurses all wear pink; the doctors on the medical TV show wore blue, or sometimes green, so maybe they're like uniforms, the color depended on the department?

Steve blinks, realises he's been staring at his neighbor's laundry basket. Kate's looking up at him with a small smile, but her eyebrows are pretty high on her forehead.

"Hi," he replies quickly. What does he do with his hands? It feels disrespectful to keep them in his pockets, but he doesn't have a hat or anything else to keep them from fidgeting. "Did you hear they want to replace the machine?"

"Yeah, this one makes weird noises," she says, nodding right. Steve follows her gaze and there's a machine there with a sheet of paper taped on its front: "DO NOT USE" in blocky, red letters. 

"Can't they repair it?"

"Honestly, they probably could, but it'd probably cost just under what a new machine would."

"Why?"

She shrugs and pulls her basket close. "Things like washing machines are generally cheap," she says as she opens a box and starts spooning washing powder into the machine, "and more and more cannot be fixed, because replacement parts aren't made."

"Seems like a waste."

"Sometimes it's better to just replace something that doesn't work. Sunk cost fallacy and all that."

"The smart thing would be not to replace as is, but make something better," Steve argues, pulling his hands out of his pockets, and immediately shoving them back in.

Kate smiles at him as she stands up and moves to the small sink. She rinses her hands and shakes them dry, before rubbing the palms against her hips. She looks vaguely familiar. It's been bugging him for a while, but he still can't put a finger on it, because he is equally sure he's never seen her outside of this building.

"I've never seen you down here," she says, as she moves to the small mound of freshly washed laundry and opens the drier. 

"I have a washing machine. I was just wondering about the types, they said they want to get—" he spares a look at the front of the broken unit "—pretty much the same model."

"Well, it gets my vote. It's a pretty okay washing machine."

"Makes sense," Steve agrees verbally, already adding the meeting to his plans. Makes no sense to him to replace the machine with more of the same, if it broke. It looks pretty new. He looks around for another topic of conversation, and comes up short. Kate is still looking at him, though, so he hastily bids her good evening and retreats to the safety of the staircase. 

Damn it. He should have asked her out for coffee. If nothing else it would have gotten Natasha off his back.

He makes it to his door, but as he's pulling his keys out he feels someone watching him. The hair stands on the back of his neck, but his hands continue without pause: insert the key, turn it in the lock, hand on the handle, one foot braced for a high kick or jump, the other firmly against the floor.

"Captain Rogers?"

Steve turns.

The man does not register as a threat, though he's about Steve's size. He doesn't look like he's a fighter. His brown hair is loose, falling to his shoulders, he's wearing a backpack over one shoulder, denim pants and sneakers; his jacket does not seem to be concealing any weapons, a paper bag is dangling from his fingers, but from the way it's swinging it seems to be too light to be hiding anything Steve should be concerned about. While there are several pins on the man's backpack, they seem to be of the rainbow variety, which are only dangerous emotionally, if one's a particular brand of asshole. Steve gives the man a second once-over, to be sure, but the warning bells are already off. 

"Yes?"

"I, uh. My name is James Barnes, I'm an adjunct at Georgetown University. Someone is trying to kill me?"

Right…

"What makes you think that?"

Barnes brushes his hair aside, showing off an angry red gash. "I was shot at. And a bunch of agents showed up at my office, took my wall down, I think they were going through my computer."

"How did you know they were agents?"

"They wore black, drove black SUVs. I took money out of an ATM, and immediately one of them was there. I think they were tracking my phone, I had a much easier time getting away once I switched it off."

That does sound suspicious.

"Did you call the police?"

"Yeah, from a payphone. Two minutes later black SUVs showed up."

Steve taxes him again. "What's in the bag?"

Barnes looks down, seemingly surprised he's even holding a bag. "Uh, trash. I needed to get into the building, so I pretended I'm delivering food."

"How did you know which building?"

"Don't know what to tell you, you're kind of a celebrity," Barnes says, shrugging.

Steve narrows his eyes. "Not good enough."

"I think SHIELD's compromised."

Steve's arms drop. "What?"

Barnes clenches his fists and the paper bag and whatever plastic container is inside crinkles. A wet stain spreads on the paper, much of it underneath Barnes' fingers. "Jesus, fuck!" he cries, and then looks up at Steve, grey eyes wide and desperate.

Down below the door to the basement closes and light footsteps reach the stairs. 

"Come on in," Steve says tightly, pushing the door open.

Barnes enters with a sigh of relief, trying to hold the bag close to his chest, to avoid spillage and as far away from himself as possible at the same time.

"The kitchen's through there, the bin is under the sink."

"Thanks."

Barnes moves to stuff the whole bag into the garbage bin, but stops himself. "Do you segregate trash?"

"Just throw it out."

Barnes nods, tosses the bag out, hitches the backpack higher on his shoulder with a well-practiced shrug and turns the faucet, squeezing a glob of the dishwashing soap onto his hands. He's looking around, not shy about it in the slightest, as he lathers his palms and then the backs of them with truly impressive dedication; he rubs the pads of his fingers against the hollow of his palms, then spreads them out, hooking the fingers of one hand into the other, before rinsing.

"My mom is a nurse, she made us learn proper handwashing techniques," Barnes says over his shoulder. 

"That's the proper technique?" Steve isn't going to pretend he wasn't staring.

"I mean technically you're supposed to wash all the way up over your wrist, but yeah, this is recommended." Barnes reaches over the counter for a paper towel, tears a segment and pats his hands dry.

"Huh," Steve says. It didn't last this long when Kate washed her hands in the laundry room. Maybe it didn't matter outside of the hospital. "So, about what you just—?"

But Barnes is holding up his hand and pointing with the other at the light fixture on the bottom of his shelf. 

"What?"

He whirls in place, grabs a notepad which Steve immediately tears from his hand. "Listen, i don't know—"

Barnes waves his hands and mimics writing, panic now evident on his face. 

Steve sighs, flips through the notebook to tear out a blank page, and pulls out a pen from a jar and hands both over. Within seconds Barnes thrusts the paper back at him, with one word on it: BUG.

"What?"

Barnes waves a hand, points at the fixture. Steve bends next to him, follows his line of sight, a touch distracted by the brush of hair, a whiff of cologne just barely dabbed over the warm smell of a human body, but then he sees it: a tiny rectangle, concealed right in the corner of the frame, behind the lightbulb.

"Fuck!" Steve is going to have a very stern conversation with Fury.

"The handwashing really is a habit by now," Barnes says, clasping his hands together. He's shaking, but reaches for the paper again. 

_ I think SHIELD is compromised _ , he writes, and out loud he says, "Hard to get away with dirty hands when your mom is a nurse."

"Tell me about it," Steve mutters as he watches Barnes continue to scribble. "Try washing off the grime of your hands in winter when the piping can freeze any minute."

_ I teach political science, wrote an article about SHIELD being taken over from the inside by a hostile organization. It was hypothetical, but this morning my sister called saying my roommate is dead. Someone was in my office, took my wall down. _

Steve stares at the paper. On one hand, this is still purely hypothetical. On the other… he's not exactly thrilled with the way SHIELD is running things, and the thing over his sink could be a bug. He finds he isn't surprised in the slightest that someone might be listening to him.

He's dialling Natasha's number before he can think about it.

"Rogers," she drawls. "Fancy hearing from you at this hour."

"I need to talk to you," he says simply. "You have time for a coffee?"

There's a beat of surprise on the other end. "I can make time. You have a place in mind?"

Steve really doesn't. A safe place? One that's safe from SHIELD's bugging? What does he know that isn't SHIELD, these days? His only thought is Sam, and that leads him to the VA. He rattles the address off. "There's this coffeeshop at the corner."

"I'll meet you there."

"Let's go," he says shortly, grabbing his keys, the shield and its harness, and a spare helmet. 

"Please don't take me to the police," Barnes says once they are out the door and Steve is turning the key in the lock. 

"Not going to. Put this on."

Barnes' already wide grey eyes go even wider when the shield harness is thrust into his hands. He stares at Steve like he doesn't quite get what he's holding. "Uh…"

"It's like a backpack, the metal part goes between your shoulder blades, facing out. Adjust the straps and it should fit over your backpack."

"Is this for the shield?" Barnes eyes are shiny and a little bit panicked as he stares at Steve then down at the object in question.

"I wish it was foldable, too," Steve says as Barnes fumbles with the straps and clips his own backpack tighter. He hands over the helmet next, and this causes almost as much confusion.

"I've never ridden a motorcycle!"

"That's why I'm driving."

"Where are we going?" Barnes asks, then immediately rolls his eyes. "That place you mentioned, duh."

Steve swings a leg over the bike and nods at the back. "Get on."

"Is it safe to go to that address?" Barnes asks, settling on the back of the bike hesitantly.

"What do you mean?"

"If your place is bugged, your phone probably is, too."

Shit. Steve didn't think of that. But the plan is sound. "I need Natasha for this," he says shortly. "We'll deal with it," he says, and just as he finishes saying that, his phone rings.

It's Rumlow.

"Cap, hey."

"Brock," Steve says politely. "Is there a mission?"

"Briefing. We need you in immediately."

"I'm a little busy at the moment."

"Secretary's orders."

Well, this is not good. Barnes is tense against his back, barely breathing. He must be hearing every word.

"I can be there in an hour," Steve says.

"Traffic ain't that bad at this hour, Cap."

"Maybe, but my laundry's gonna be done in ten, and I'm not leaving it in the machine."

On the other end Rumlow pauses. "Just don't delay."

Steve hangs up. "Put your feet here," he indicates with his heel, "your arms around my waist."

"Oh my god." Barnes does as instructed, his chest warm even through the jacket Steve is wearing, and they are pulling away from the curb.

Steve feels the exact moment Barnes realizes they are in motion proper, because his grip becomes so much tighter and the helmet he's wearing digs into Steve's spine. Poor guy, he thinks, allowing himself a small smirk, and cranks the gas.

* * *

It's barely gotten dark, the street should not be this dark and deserted. Steve frowns at the faint glimmer of lights in the windows of the VA, the brightly lit coffee shop on the corner. The barista should be visible at this angle, but there is no one behind the counter, even though Steve could swear that the shop did not close until nine pm. 

"Keep the helmet on," he says to Barnes. He feels the already vice-like grip tighten around his ribs in response. 

In the same second a black SUV comes to a stop at the corner, barely coming to a stop before Rumlow steps out. 

"Cap!" he calls, with a wide grin. "Pierce's in a hurry, let me give you a ride."

Those motherfuckers are monitoring my phone, Steve thinks, and his fingers tighten on the handlebars. "You go, I'll follow."

"Can't bring a civilian into SHIELD, you know it will take forever to get him through security."

"Fine, give me ten minutes, I'll drive him home."

"We really don't have that kind of time."

Damn straight they don't. Rumlow is holding himself still, too still, and his eyes keep darting around. There's a team in position, likely one behind them, with a gun aimed at Barnes' back. The shield will protect him, should anyone be stupid enough to try shooting, but odds are they wouldn't dare shooting, anyway. The cameras are probably off, but this is a residential street, and the moment someone shoots there will be faces in the windows. Most of the windows are dark, so for now they probably have no audience, but that could change in seconds; hard to say whose advantage it is. Any spectator means the police will be called, but SHIELD tends to take over, when present. Best to handle it himself, he decides.

"Barnes," Steve says under his breath, revving the engine, "keep the shield on."

He doesn't hear the response, but he does feel the sharp movement of Barnes' chest against his back. Rumlow has four men with him… if he's right there would be another four somewhere behind them. The SUV is blocking the street, and though he's got greater mobility, he's also got a passenger.

Except if Barnes is right, he's not going to be a possible casualty… he's the target. So Steve needs to take them out quick, while keeping Barnes safe.

Out of the corner of his eye he notices another SUV, silently rolling onto the street behind him. Both exits blocked, then, a civilian target, and eight members of STRIKE who are definitely not telling him the fucking truth.

Steve grins mirthlessly. 

"Cap… Just get in the car. It'll be easier."

"For you, certainly."

Rumlow sighes. "I tried." He does not make eye contact with his team, his face doesn't even twitch, but the three at his side spread out, batons unholstered. "Nothing personal, Cap."

The first strike comes from behind. Steve rolls off the bike, taking Barnes with him, presses him against the concrete and springs. He latches onto the baton, just above the handgrip, his other hand finding purchase on the man's shoulder straps, and uses his weight to flip him. A well-aimed kick loosens the man's grip on the baton, and Steve jams it into the neck of the next. 

Rumlow comes at him, upper and middle left, Steve folds, turns, grabs one of the guys behind him, throws him blindly directly into the electricity current at the end of the baton Rumlow is wagging his way.

Number three is down. Four and five get flattened against the ground, six requires the force of a double punch and a kick to stop coming back for more. Seven catches him by surprise, byt getting close enough to Barnes to get his helmet off, and then in turn getting surprised by Steve slamming the helmet into his unprotected face. He falls, hand still grasping Barnes' shoulder, and both of them hit the ground, but Barnes extricates himself immediately, rolling to the site and giving Steve enough space to grab a spare baton from the man's holster, switch it on, and jam the prongs into the tender underside of Rumlow's jaw.

Rumlow folds onto the ground, face first.

"Feels kinda personal," Steve mutters, slamming the baton in two over his knee. "Are you okay?"

Barnes stares at the prone bodies on the ground and swallows nervously, before looking up at Steve. "I–" he tries. "I think so?" he touches his cheek and his breathing picks up, veering dangerously close to hyperventilation.

Half of his face is bloodied. The gash must have re-opened when he hit the ground, adding to it the scrape of asphalt. Steve can't quite explain how his hand ended up on Barnes' face, but there it is, tilting his head gently to inspect the wound. "It's okay," he says quietly. "It looks worse than it is."

"I'm sorry, I'm—" Barnes swallows nervously. "I'm sorry, I didn't think they would try to hurt you, I promise, I thought—"

"It's fine," Steve says. "Don't worry about it. It's my job."

"Getting shot by your coworkers shouldn't be your job!" Barnes protests heatedly, before he looks around. "Are they going to be okay? Should we call 911 or something?"

Steve blinks. Barnes is staring at the STRIKE team on the ground and wringing his hands. "They were trying to kill you a moment ago," he points out.

"I know, but it doesn't seem right to just leave them here."

Steve tries to find a response, but out of the corner of his eye he sees a change in texture of shadows, just outside the circle of lamplight, and turns, ready for round two. 

"Wow," says a voice from the shadows. "I leave you alone for ten minutes."

"Natasha." He does not relax just yet; his instinct was to call Natasha, but now he's not so sure. They lock eyes: she is searching his face as much as he's searching hers. He finds a challenge there, but for all that he knows he cannot trust her fully, he knows if she were to come for him, she would do it to his face.

"Let's get out of here," she says, sparing a short glance at Barnes.

"What about—"

She strides onto the street, pulls Rumlow's gun out of its holster and fires three times into a nearby tree. "There. Someone will look out the window and call the cops, if they haven't already. Drop your phone and let's move."

"You have your car?" 

"I have a car."

"Do we have a safe place to go?"

She hesitates at that. "I'm not sure."

"Natasha."

Natasha stops in the middle of the sidewalk. "We skipped introductions," she tells Barnes with a sunny smile.

"I know who you are."

"Well, I can't say the sentiment is reciprocated."

"I am very surprised," Steve snarks, to which she responds with annoyance.

"I only act like i know everything, Rogers!" She stops by a nondescript Kia, clicks the doors open and slides into the driver's seat.

The car starts and Barnes slides the shield off his back and into the back seat. "I'm James Barnes. People usually call me Bucky. I'm an adjunct at Georgetown, political science."

"Right… and STRIKE wants you dead because of a couple of failed grades?"

Barnes, Bucky, takes a deep breath. "SHIELD is compromised. The whole organization. I think it's been infiltrated and now a sizable part of the upper levels are in on something, and not in a usual intelligence org way."

Natasha takes the news as though they were a weather report. "That's quite a claim."

"My place is bugged," Steve says. "So is my phone, it looks like."

"That's pretty standard for SHIELD."

"Why, though? Why spy on your own, unless you already suspect them?" Bucky clenches his fist and glares at Natasha. "There is a level of paranoia that just makes it impossible to function, and this is it. If they spy on their own agents, that means they don't trust them. That means they think it's likely their own agents will act against them at the drop of a hat, and that means they either don't trust their vetting process, or there's something an agent could easily find that would make them want to turn."

"Or, certain high-value assets are under surveillance for their own protection."

"All due respect, ma'am, that's police state bullshit," Bucky says hotly. "You can't effectively protect someone if they don't agree or know they need to be protected, and you certainly can't spy on people in the name of protecting them."

Natasha looks at Steve with her eyebrows raised, but he shrugs. "I agree with him."

"There's a chance you might be in the wrong business."

"I'm serious," Steve says. "Something's off with SHIELD."

"We need somewhere we can talk," Natasha says, shaking her head.

Steve hesitates. "I know a guy. I'm not sure where he lives, though."

Natasha slows down, executes a perfect parallel park into a space between two trees, pulls out a packet of wipes out and a small bottle of disinfectant. "Wipe the seats and anything you might have touched."

Steve stares at her. "Did you steal this car?"

"Well, I wasn't going to use my own, was I?"

* * *

Ten minutes later she knocks on the door of a nice, suburban home. The neighborhood is quiet. Steve spies three flags discreetly tucked into window frames on the street; present, yet unobtrusive.

There are footsteps inside and Sam Wilson opens the door. "This is a surprise," he says, eyebrows raised. 

"For both of us." Steve glares at Natasha. "I didn't know we were coming to you."

"Can we come in?" she asks, batting her eyelashes. "People are trying to kill us."

" _ Mi case es su  _ safe house, then," Sam says, giving Steve a look that encompasses both the Black Widow and the twitchy academic at his side.

"Sorry. Sam, this is Natasha and Bucky," Steve says. "I would really like Natasha to explain how she knew to come here, because I didn't."

"I looked you up after we met the other day," Natasha says with a shrug. "It's policy."

"Whose policy?"

"Fury's. We keep tabs on you."

"Why? I wasn't told to keep tabs on you."

"I wasn't frozen for seventy years."

"No, but you defected from a superpower that we have a tense relationship with," Bucky says. "It would make exactly as much sense to keep tabs on you. More."

Steve is then treated to a rare sight: a speechless Natasha. He guesses more than he knows that, though, and even then it's mostly from the way she fixes her eyes on Bucky's face and keeps them there until he starts to squirm.

"SHIELD agents gossip," he mumbles. "I wasn't 100% sure, but your codename is Black Widow, so…"

"Very few people should be privy to this information."

"Your name is literally Romanov!"

"When it needs to be."

"I'm not keeping tabs on you," Steve interjects quietly.

Natasha shrugs. "Others do."

Bucky scoffs. "That's fucked up. People shouldn't have to live like this."

"You don't know me," she says, this time smiling just a little bit.

"I don't need to know you. It's fucked up to live under constant surveillance."

"Right…" Sam, thus far silent, looks between the three of them. "So, are any of you hungry? I was about to start on dinner, except now I need to go do some additional shopping."

"Order a pizza," Natasha says, pulling out her wallet. "I want mushrooms on mine."

Sam looks at Steve, then takes the fifty out of her hand. "Done." He picks up a phone and selects a flier from a pile by the door. "Make yourselves at home. Bathroom is through there."

Steve nods his thanks and follows Natasha and Bucky into Sam's living room.

You can immediately tell Sam was in the military. The room is neat, not showcase neat, but put together and tidy in a way that leaves plenty of space for movement and clear sightlines. There are three photos on the walls: Sam and a blond man, both in fatigues, a squad of soldiers posing in harsh desert sun, and Sam with his arms around two women, one about his own age, the other much older, both proudly showing off the same tooth gap in matching grins, while the second man in the picture, an older gentleman with kind eyes, looks at the trio fondly. His hand is extended to the very edge of the picture, probably holding the camera.

"So, pizza ordered," Sam says, coming into the room. "Now can I get some details?" He looks around the room, and his eyes zero-in on Bucky. "You might want to clean that up."

Bucky blinks at him. "What?"

"Your face is bloody."

Bucky blinks at him and touches his fingertips to his cheek. He hisses. "Yeah, okay."

"You need help with that?"

"I don't think it's that bad."

"There's a first aid kit in the bathroom, second shelf," Sam says. "Disinfect and I'll have a look. I've paramedic training," he adds to the room at large. Bucky nods at him and ambles into the bathroom, one hand still on his face, and Sam catches Steve's eye as the door closes behind him. His eyebrow goes up, twitches briefly, and Steve flushes and looks away, caught in the act.

The water flows on the other side of the door, then there is a series of splashes and then a high-pitched curse.

"You okay in there?" Sam asks through the door. 

"Yeah, sorry," Bucky answers. "Come in. I know I'm probably overreacting," he says once Sam walks in. The door does not close, so Steve props a shoulder against a door frame to make sure no injuries are being hidden. He sees in the mirror that the first aid kit is open, and also that, once cleaned, Bucky's face is in one piece, though a fat drop of blood is swelling in the cut. "In my defence this is probably the worst injury I've ever had."

"It's pretty nasty," Sam says, and points to the edge of the bathtub. "Sit down."

He proceeds to dab at the cut with a cotton ball soaked in something so pungent Steve smells it all the way out in the corridor. "I'm going to put a couple of butterfly stitches on, okay? It will heal better."

"Okay."

Sam makes quick work of it, gently pulling the skin together and finishing off with a thin strip of adhesive. "There, good as new."

"I'm not a twelve year old girl," Bucky mutters. "I don't need my face to be pretty."

"No offence, but if that wasn't your end goal, you failed hard."

"You calling me pretty?"

"I'm saying you don't hurt to look at," Sam says with a wink. "Steve certainly noticed."

Bucky's whole entire face turns red, and Steve feels a wave of heat spread all over his own. "That wasn't—we just met like three hours ago!"

"Relax, I'm messing with you."

"How do you know Steve?" Bucky asks curiously. "He thought of you immediately when he was looking for a place, and I don't think you work together."

"We actually just met the other day, during a morning run. He started giving me shit for no reason."

"He seems like a guy that would, yeah. I mean we were kind of in a hurry, but i could swear he was judging me for not wanting to be on a bike."

"Those things are death machines," Sam says solemnly, and then, completely without warning, looks up into the mirror and winks.

Steve, acutely aware of the beet-root shade of his entire upper half, turns around, meets Natasha's very amused gaze and ducks into what ends up being a kitchen. He stares at the neat rows of glasses in a cabinet, and realizes he's thirsty as hell.

Thankfully, Sam and Bucky walk out of the bathroom shortly after, and Steve quickly returns to the living room. "Can I have some water?" he asks, and another fifteen minutes are spent dispensing drinks to everyone, followed by the arrival of the pizza, and the necessity of plates.

Steve has already inhaled two slices when Natasha, chewing through the crust of her first, nods at Bucky. "Why is STRIKE after you?"

Bucky looks around the table, puts down his second slice and takes a deep breath. "I'm an adjunct in political science at Georgetown. I mostly teach intro and a couple of other modules, and a class on conspiracy theories. Two months ago I wrote an article on SHIELD's recent activities in Africa, which got me thinking about their structure, but I was also in the middle of preparing a lesson plan, so I wrote this half-fictional article about SHIELD being taken over from the inside by Hydra, slightly exaggerated for effect, to show how that would manifest. I put it online for my students, as an example weaving a compelling conspiracy theory."

"Hydra in SHIELD." Steve's hands tremble. "That's quite the leap."

"On one hand yes, but it's surprising how strong the support is. There were thousands of Nazi scientists recruited by the American intelligence following the war. It's not that far out there that some of them would be affiliated with Hydra, and Hydra was a cult, it's not that much of a leap to imagine them trying to build something locally. In fact it would be stupid to assume they wouldn't."

"They wouldn't—" Peggy certainly wouldn't have allowed it!

"They would. It was called Operation Paperclip. They recruited whoever they could to get an edge on the Soviet Union." Bucky falters, possibly because Steve's sure his face is a picture right now. "I'm sorry," he says. "I thought it would be a fun exercise for my students to see how to get to a bonkers conclusion from partial information. I thought I was being clever.

"Then…" Bucky hesitates and his voice trembles. "My roommate died this morning. At least my sister called and told me the police called her and said I was dead, killed in a car crash. Thing is, usually Rob drives my car, and he forgot his license when he last took it. He looks like me, from a distance, I guess. I haven't heard from him since last afternoon. Then someone was in my office and dismantled my wall – I keep my ideas pinned there – and guys in black SUVs were following me. I think they shot at me, too."

"That's not much to go on," Natasha says. "Do you have anything concrete?"

"I'm a teacher," Bucky says peevishly. "I consulted for a bunch of congresspeople, but I'm also not thirty yet, and my PhD is brand new, so it was mainly about local healthcare initiatives that no one in power cares about."

"So you decided to take it to Captain America?"

"I tried the police first, but when I called them black SUVs showed up, so I thought it might be better to play it safe. I thought… I thought since he works for SHIELD he might be able to find something out."

Steve heaves a deep sigh, sets his fourth slice of pizza down. "Bucky found bugs in my apartment, I called Natasha and STRIKE was waiting for us. They were willing to go through me before actually telling me what's going on."

Sam chews on his slice of pepperoni thoughtfully. "That does not look good."

"There's more. Someone tried to take out Director Fury," Natasha says.

"What?"

"STRIKE contacted me right after you called. They said you might be in danger, that someone is targeting you. They didn't seem to know who or why, so I called Fury to be reassigned to your detail."

"I have a detail?" Steve asks, surprised, but Natasha continues talking as though he hasn't spoken.

"He was in the middle of a shootout with what seemed to be police, but the police have not been deployed. I checked."

"That's a little on the nose," Bucky says.

"You think?"

"I just mean… taking people out in such an obvious way is extremely risky. And I don't even mean me, no one would notice me dying, but the director of SHIELD? That's insane. Unless he knew something that posed an immediate problem."

"Insight," Steve says. He sinks deeper into the couch. "SHIELD is days away from launching Project Insight. It's three helicarriers, able to take out threats from orbit. People. Fury said they are able to take out specific people from orbit."

Bucky looks around. "That can't be it."

"What do you mean that can't be it?"

"It can't just be that. The existing drone program is not that different. It's less accurate, maybe, but it can't be only about slightly bigger drones, can it? There has to be something more to it."

"That sounds like a pretty big upgrade."

"No, he has a point." Natasha looks at Steve. "It's not that big of an upgrade, considering what we already have. Fury must know something else. The Lemurian Star – he sent us there to get information."

"Except we've got no way of talking to him now."

"There's a couple of obvious places he could have gone, Wilmington, Pasadena, New Orleans…" 

Pasadena. Huh. Steve pats his pockets and pulls out the small envelope he found in his mailbox.

"Steve?" 

"I found this in my mailbox a few hours ago. It's postmarked Pasadena." The paper and the foil underneath tears easily. Inside there's a flash drive wrapped in a post-it note.

"Trust no one, take the elevator, carry a 45," he reads.

Natasha looks between him and the note. "Is this a code?"

"Fury told me a story about his grandfather the other day. He operated an elevator and carried a gun in his shoulder bag, as protection from robbers. It's from Fury." He turns the flash drive in his hands. "Isn't this the one you took from the Lemurian Star?" he asks Natasha. "Looks exactly the same."

"What's on it?" Bucky and Sam ask in unison.

"I don't know," Natasha responds immediately.

"You were the one who filled it."

"Doesn't mean the contents are within my pay grade," she says, shrugging. 

"We need to know what's on it," Steve says. "Sam, do you have a computer we could use?"

"Not here," Natasha says before Sam can offer an answer. "Things like that… they might not be safe to open. We need an exit strategy before we plug it into anything."

"What do you propose?"

Natasha drums her fingernails on the table. "We go to a mall. They wouldn't dare cause too much of a scene in a mall."

Steve nods and stands up. "Are we good to go?"

"Now?" Bucky asks, alarmed. "You wanna go now?"

"If this is about Insight, we can't waste time."

"You," Natasha says with a small smile, "are not going."

"But—"

"Chances are they will be looking for the signal, so we may need to be ready to fight our way out. You'd be a liability."

Bucky looks at Steve and opens his mouth as though to protest, but ends up saying nothing. He lists to the side to untangle the harness for the shield from the backrest of the chair and hands it to Steve. He stares at him openly with his hand extended. "Just… be careful, okay?"

"We'll be careful," Steve says.

"Come on, it will be fun," Sam says. "We'll finish the pizza, watch the news. You can explain to me what the US military is doing wrong."

Bucky scowls at him. "I've seen your bookshelf, pal. Seems to me you don't need explaining." He stalks into the living room, and collapses into a chair.

"It was nice to meet you, Sam. Sorry to run out on the pizza," Natasha says, throwing a wink over her shoulder.

"Hey man, you paid for it."

"Fair. Leave me a slice, won't you?"

"No promises." 

Natasha disappears into the hallway, but Steve hesitates.

"Steve?" Sam is looking at him with his eyebrows raised.

"Look after him, okay?" Steve says quietly, nodding towards the living room. "He's had a hell of a day."

Sam raises an eyebrow. "I see how it is," he drawls, wagging his eyebrows up and down.

"It isn't!" Steve protests hotly at the clear insinuation, but Sam only laughs. 

"You got it. I'll make sure he's safe and sound."

"Thanks Sam." Steve casts another look into the living room, where he can see, just barely, the back of Bucky's head. "Stay safe."


	3. The conclusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's qualified to discuss theoretical conspiracies, from the safety of his office. This is way above his paygrade.

Bucky gets back to the table and finishes the pizza slice he started, crust and all, before the day catches up to him and saps all the energy from his limbs. He sinks into the chair and stares blankly at the wall ahead, over the two whole pizzas they didn't yet touch and half-filled plates. 

Sam comes back into the room and takes a seat, picks up his pizza and looks at him sympathetically. "Rough day?"

"I'm a teacher," Bucky says to the ceiling. "I was shot at today. That's not exactly in my job description."

"Can't relate." 

Bucky's head rolls to the side of its own account and he stares. Sam is looking back at him with a half-smile, and Bucky connects the dots. The pictures. The desert and the fatigues. "How do you deal with it?"

Sam huffs. "Hard to say. You find what works, something that keeps you grounded. Family, friends, a job, hobby."

Bucky sits up straight, jolted into life by the image of Becca and Beth and Bee, of his mom and dad. The image floats like a photograph in his mind, fluttering in the wind.

"What if they go after my family?" Bucky asks in a rush, now earnestly panicked. "I've a facebook, my sisters are all linked there, what if someone makes the connection–"

"Hey, relax," Sam says. "Relax. Going after your family is the worst thing they could possibly do right now. Your roommate already died, right? It would be very suspicious if other people around you started dying all of sudden."

Bucky clenches his fists. "Unless they thought they know what I know."

"Didn't you publish the article?"

"What?"

"You said you put the article online. That means anyone can download it, right?"

"Holy shit, my students!" 

"Hey, hey! Sit down. They can't pick off a whole class of students." Sam reaches out, puts his hand on Bucky's shoulder. "That would be nonsense. It's out now, they can try recalling it, but the more they splash about, the more people will download, the more out there it becomes."

Bucky settles, or at least most of him does; the heart needs a while to get the memo.

Sam keeps looking, one elbow on the table. "Can I read it?"

"If you have a uni account, and I don't think logging in right now is the best idea." Bucky blinks. "I have a copy on my cloud." He stares at the wall some more. "What if I put it online?"

"It already is online, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but like… really online. What if I put it somewhere everyone can download it."

Sam stares at him. "That… that might work."

"If it's everywhere, and everyone knows, who cares if it's true." Bucky stands up, fists clenched. "Where's my backpack?"

"Hold up, hold up!" Sam throws his arms out, stopping him. "Take a moment. There's still a chance when you post it they will want to take you out."

"Why?"

"Revenge? C'mon. If you're right, then there's a Nazi death cult on your tail. Or a secret organization inside an espionage agency, I'm honestly not sure which is worse."

Bucky folds back into his chair and clenches his fists. "What if they come after Steve?"

"He's going to handle it," Sam says. "He's Captain America."

"I got him into this… I got  _ you  _ into this!"

"Hey – Steve got me into this. Not you."

"I went to him!"

"And he made the call to come here. Sit down." Sam keeps staring at him, palms extended. "For what it's worth, I think you made the right call."

Bucky nods, mutely, and folds his arms across his chest, suddenly out of steam. His limbs feel like they're made of lead. It's done now. There's nothing he can do.

"Look, maybe you should get some sleep."

"Wha—"

"Sleep," Sam says kindly. "Steve and Natasha will probably be a few hours, and it's been a long day."

"What if—"

"I hear you, man," Sam interrupts, "but trust me when I say you will crash eventually, and you don't want it to happen in the middle of a chase."

Bucky nods, uncertainly.

"I'll make up the guest room. You go have a shower."

Fifteen minutes later Bucky, clean, slightly damp, and wearing a pair of borrowed sweatpants and a worn Air Force t-shirt, is staring at the nice, clean bed, thinking of how Steve is out there, with a target on his back, because of the hot mess he brought to him.

"Do not overthink it," Sam's voice says behind his back.

Bucky's heart nearly leaps out of his mouth, but the rest of his body is too tired to react. 

"Lie down."

Bucky peels the covers away, just enough to get into the bed, but not enough to lose the tautness of a well-tucked blanket, and curls up.

"I will wake you when Steve and Natasha make contact."

"Thanks," Bucky whispers, and that's it, he's done, he's out.

* * *

The sheets are unfamiliar. Bucky sits up and looks around, confused. The room is nice, too plain to be something people actually live in, but not a hotel room, either. His head is not pounding, so he's not sleeping a party off, so what is it?

There's a knock on the door, moments before it opens, and Bucky's brain comes online in a flash of realization. 

"Steve and Natasha are back," Sam says, grimly. "You might want to hear this."

He leaves and Bucky almost trips over his own feet following, utterly forgetting he's wearing, essentially, pajamas. He stumbles into Sam's living room to find Steve and Natasha, noticeably singed, staring up at him with empty eyes.

"Are you okay?" he manages, before he breathes wrong and starts coughing. "Sorry. Sorry. What happened?"

"We're fine," Natasha says woodenly. She looks to her right, at Steve, who meets Bucky's eyes.

"You were right." Steve stares right at him, unblinking. "You were right about everything."

"I—what?"

"SHIELD has been—is Hydra. Has been from the very beginning." His face twists. "You were right about Operation Paperclip."

"Holy shit," Bucky whispers and falls onto the couch. "I didn't—I didn't actually expect that to literally be true… I thought maybe the Director owes Russia money or something."

"The tracker got us to Camp Lehigh in Jersey, where SHIELD started," Natasha says. "Turned out they appropriated the space to turn it into a giant repository for Zola."

"Repository?"

"Apparently he turned himself into a computer before he died, to preserve his brilliant brain. They had so much use for him, they felt it's important they keep him around after his death," Steve says bitterly. "SHIELD did that. They put money, and technology, behind preserving that—"

"Did you find out what they're planning?" Bucky asks, urgently.

"Nothing concrete, but now that we know Zola is behind it, probably nothing good."

"At least he's gone now," Natasha says, shrugging. She looks at Sam and Bucky and adds, "they blew up the base with us in it. We got lucky."

"They fired rockets at a military base in New Jersey? How the fuck they got authorization to do that?"

"They've got someone high up the ladder."

"Who's high enough to have the authority to fire missiles on American soil?"

Natasha leans back. "The Secretary. Alexander Pierce."

Alexander Pierce! Bucky's heart is suddenly in his mouth. The man turned down a Nobel prize! His reform of SHIELD reduced their death toll by twenty-seven percent, and among the civilian population by thirty-nine. Bucky had a picture of the man on his wall!

"How do we get to him?" Steve asks.

"That might not be easy."

"I'm shutting it down, Natasha. All of it."

"There's more to SHIELD than… that," Bucky says, gesturing vaguely to encompass the possible Nazi infiltration and standard alphabet agency fuckery. There's a lot to cover there, he'll admit. "That's not great, obviously, but—"

"But what? High command is full of Nazis," Steve says, irritably. "Has been since the beginning. What more is there?"

"There're people there who joined for the right reasons. Just shutting it all down puts them at risk."

"We don't shut it down, who knows what Insight's going to do. If they joined for the right reasons, they would understand. If they didn't, fuck them," Steve says.

"You don't get to make that call!"

"Peggy said she called it SHIELD after me. That gives me the right to burn it down."

"That's not how it works!"

"It does now," Steve says, clenching his jaw. "They can posture all they want, but if we cut off the head and burn the stump, it will eventually die."

Bucky stares at Natasha and Sam in turn, then back to Steve. "SHIELD is not some mythical monster. It has agents in some of the most contentious places on the globe. If something goes wrong, if the wrong people are in the wrong place, setting SHIELD on fire will burn them."

Steve opens his mouth, but Bucky's on a roll now, full-on teacher mode. 

"And even if you are willing to sacrifice them, what if they are Hydra? A hostile agent can cause unfathomable damage. They could cause riots. They could cause wars. Intelligence agencies in peacetime are not Nazi high command at war, Steve. You take off the head, the thrashing body will start spewing deadly poison."

"Taking off the head ended the war."

"It didn't end Hydra, because first you delivered the poison factory to people who mounted it on a shield and used it!" Bucky says, hotly.

Steve stands. He's not that much taller than Bucky himself is, but the force of his glare bears the full weight and might of a supersoldier war veteran. Well, the joke's on him: Bucky's a teacher. He's had muscular dudebros staring him down while begging for assignment extension. Bucky will not be cowed.

"For what it's worth, I don't disagree," Natasha says into the dead silence, "with either of you. SHIELD needs to go down. But you are not wrong, either. Burning it to the ground may cause repercussions."

"Problem is, we don't know the timetable," Sam says. "If you're right, Insight is bad, and it's fast. When did you say it's going live?"

"Three days," Steve says, still not taking his eyes off Bucky.

"There's a solid chance they would speed up the launch now that Captain America is on the run," Natasha says. "We need more information."

"Who would know?"

"We can't exactly go to Pierce, and Fury is in the wind."

"Do we know Fury is on the right side?" Sam asks.

"They did just try to kill him."

"Hydra would kill their own once they've outlived their usefulness," Steve says. "But the drive is from Fury, so at the very least he was not on board with  _ something  _ about Insight."

"Also, he's black," Bucky points out. "I don't see Hydra letting him join."

"True."

Bucky sighs and sinks into a chair, so that he can stare at the ceiling. "You probably don't want the top guy. He'd know, but that would spook everyone. You want someone high up, but not that high up. Someone you could pin this whole thing on. Probably not even director level."

"Sitwell was on the Lemurian Star." Natasha stands. "He's got direct access to Pierce, he will know enough to be worth asking."

Sam stares at them both, arms folded. "So what's the plan?"

"You don't have to do this," Steve says. "You got out for a reason."

"Hey, Captain America needs my help. No better reason to get back in," Sam says. He shakes his head, then turns to his bookshelf and returns with a slim file, which he holds out to Steve.

"I thought you said you were a pilot," Steve says wryly. 

"Never said pilot," Sam tells him. 

A phone rings, and Bucky starts. It's not his – his phone is still off. It had better be, at least. His fingers wrap around it and he stares at the black screen. Becca must be going nuts. He hasn't checked in in twenty-four hours.

"Bucky?" Steve's staring at him, at the phone in his hands. So is Natasha.

"I wasn't—" he says immediately, holding it up. "It's off. I just… last my sister's heard of me, the police were telling her I was dead, then we spoke and I hung up on her. They must be worried."

"Your phone is being tracked," Natasha says. "You turn it on, there will be a STRIKE team here within minutes."

"I know that!" Seriously, he's not a child. "I wasn't going to switch it on, give me some credit." He drops it on the coffee table. "I'm not stupid."

"We know that," she says softly.

"Is it true you can track a switched-off phone?" he asks in turn. "I read about it."

"Depends. There is software that makes it possible, but it's unlikely you have it. There are also chips that make it possible. I doubt you have one of those, either."

"So, what's the plan?" Bucky asks, tearing his gaze away from the dark phone on the coffee table to look up at Steve. "You're going after Sitwell?"

"We are." Steve looks at Natasha, then Sam, then finally at Bucky. "But… we may need to make a stop along the way."

* * *

The first stop they make along the way, is next to a really thick wall and plenty of barbed wire. They don't stay long; Natasha walks into the building, Sam in tow, and walks out half an hour later with a suitcase of considerable size.

"All good?"

"We got what we came in for," Sam says through the open trunk of the car. "We're ready for the appointment."

They're ready to tackle the possible Hydra mole. Bucky takes a deep breath and clenches his fists. Okay. They are tackling a Hydra mole. He can deal with that. "What's the plan?" he asks, when they stop in front of a 7-eleven to stock up on protein bars and coke.

"Sitwell is meeting Senator Brand today. Sam will call him from the cafe here, and I'll be nearby to persuade him to do as Sam says."

"Persuade him how?"

Natasha pulls out a laser pointer.

It takes a moment for the dots to connect, but then Bucky realizes what she means. She's going to pretend to be scoping out the guy from a distance. "That will work?"

"As long as he doesn't see me with no gun, it should be a piece of cake. Steve will be waiting by the trees, in case we need assistance."

"No fighting?"

"Sitwell doesn't typically have a team with him. Like you said, not a big enough deal. He's got an assistant, but he usually stays in the office."

"Makes sense," Bucky says. "What then?"

"There's a nice, private rooftop we can have a chat on."

"Great. What do I do?"

Turns out what Bucky does is nothing. They leave him in the car. 

"I can help," he tells Steve, who gives him a long searching look.

"It might be better if you're not here for this," Steve says quietly. "We need to question him after."

"I can keep my mouth shut!"

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what the hell did you mean, I am just as involved now—wait, do you mean you're going to torture him? You can't torture him!"

Steve remains immobile for a good long while, long enough that Bucky's lungs are nice and full and ready to keep protesting, at which point he says, "Hey, he's not getting hurt. I promise you that. Natasha is really good at what she does, she'll get him to talk. I promise you, he will not be harmed."

"But—"

"Bucky," Steve says softly. "Please stay in the car."

"Great, what do I do if I get attacked? Yell really loud?"

"We won't be long."

"It's not like I need all this time to get shot in the head!"

"Hey!" Steve grabs his arm and pulls him in. "I will not let anything happen to you, okay? You're staying in the car because we need someone to watch the ground, and I wouldn't be leaving you here if I didn't think it was safe. Trust me?"

The air leaving his whole body is a weirder sensation than Bucky would have anticipated. "I trust you," he says. "I'm just… scared."

"We're up against a secret Nazi cell, bent on world domination. You'd be stupid not to be scared," Steve says, soft, almost like he isn't confirming Bucky's worst fears in the most intimate tone of voice.

"I don't want to die."

"Neither do I," Steve tells him, and then blinks, as though surprised.

A gust of wind moves Bucky's hair, a wisp of it ending up clinging to the stubble on his cheek, and he brushes it away impatiently. The sun is bright in the windows opposite, all of it reflected onto him, right there in the open. There's a CCTV camera on the corner, though facing the other direction: Natasha chose the parking spot casually, sliding into the perfect position just out of the camera's view.

"I'll stay in the car," Bucky says quietly. 

Steve nods. Bucky tugs at the door handle, feeling like he's watching himself trying to open the door to wonderland, which he kind of is: his warped reflection meets his eyes in the silver coat of Sam's Toyota. There's more, too. Steve's gaze, still potent despite the distortion, burns holes in him.

"We'll be back as soon as we get the intel," Steve says once Bucky is quote-unquote safe in the back seat. "Call me the moment something suspicious happens."

With that Steve turns on his heel and follows Sam and Natasha, at which point Bucky realizes they never exchanged numbers, so there's no way he'd be able to call.

It takes him another minute to remember that he doesn't have anything to call with, as switching his phone on would magically summon a flock of armed-to-the-teeth assholes in black tac-gear, hell-bent on putting holes in his skull. 

His fingers clench in the pillowed seats. It's going to be fine. They were not followed, Natasha took care of this. She's a seasoned agent, she wouldn't let herself be followed. She's a spy. She's the best spy and she fought aliens. It will only be a few minutes. Half an hour tops. There are no cameras. They don't know where he is. Yes, the camera he's looking at is 

How resilient are the bad guys, anyway? Steve will look at the guy sternly, and he'll spill. Right? 

There's a lady walking her dog across the street. She's not looking his way, but there are so many windows, surely she can see him in the reflection? Maybe the dog can smell him? It's smelling the pebbles along the way, as dogs do, but what if there's something to follow on the pebbles? All dogs can be trained to follow scents.

Oh god, what if the dog can smell him?

Someone bangs on the car window and Bucky jumps in his seat, nearly putting his head through the roof. Steve peers at him through the glass, looking grim. Behind him a bald, bespectacled man, presumably Sitwell, tries to glare, which probably would have more weight if he looked any less rattled.

Steve opens the door and motions for the man to get in. 

"That's it?" Bucky asks, looking at Steve and then Natasha. "He told you everything?" 

"Who's he?" Sitwell asks, scandalized.

"He's the academic who told us you were up to no good," Natasha says.

"Seriously?"

"Operation Dewdrop," Bucky says haughtily, "wasn't half as covert as your people think it was." The cornerstone of a truly covert operation is hiding the expenses. Any idiot can figure out something untoward is happening when the itemized expenses includes bills from restaurants on both sides of the line.

" _ Dewdrop _ ? That's what tipped you off?"

Steve turns in his seat and frowns at them both, as Sam turns the engine on. "Can we focus, please?"

"Did you find out what Insight is?"

"Zola wrote an algorithm that would target people who could be a threat to Hydra," Natasha tells him from the other end of the backseat.

"Based on what?"

"Everything," Sitwell says, with an unfair sense of pride. "Grades, credit scores, political leanings. We can predict the future."

Bucky opens his mouth, and closes it. Well. "There's a list of people Hydra wants to kill preemptively? Who's on it?"

"Apparently me, Steve and probably you," Natasha says grimly from Sitwell's right, "and twenty million others."

"Twenty million? You want to murder twenty million people?" Then the rest of the sentence filters though. "Me? Why me? Do you have the list?"

"You figured them out."

"Yeah, and I haven't exactly gone public with the news!"

"You put the article online."

"For my students! And it was a joke!"

"It's online," Natasha says. "And it's accurate, even if not on purpose. It's a fair bet you're a target."

Are his knees trembling, or are they driving over cobblestones, Bucky wonders, because this is not normal. "I'm a teacher," he says weakly. "I thought a little fiction would make my classes fun. I got a student award for best class last year."

Sitwell scoffs, and then his head snaps back. Bucky blinks at the cloud of red on the rear window, at the face turned in his direction… the red hole in the middle of the forehead, just over the shiny glasses.

He screams. 

Someone pushes his head down, down between his knees, and then the world turns upside down, in a screech of metal and sparks, shouting and squealing of brakes; sharp beams of light punctuate every slam and tumble. Someone grabs his hand and Bucky clings to it, desperately, as the car slowly comes to a stop.

"We need to get out of the car," Bucky hears and the hand holding his tugs him upward, onward. His fingers slide to his side, searching frantically for the seat belt snap, and then he's crawling out of the wreck and onto the highway. The air is whooshing around them - their lane is now thoroughly blocked, but just beyond the low concrete barrier a truck thunders by. They are on an overpass, half a mile from a safe exit in either direction.

"Stay low," Steve says, motioning him to crouch behind the car, which has a lot more holes in it than Bucky would prefer to see in his modes of transportation, but Steve is beckoning so he presses his shoulder to the warm metal and scoots until he's right next to Steve, until he's got at least a semblance of safety.

A series of bullets being fired and hitting the other side of the car startle him, but Steve just looks on, grimly, and squeezes his wrist.

"Natasha?"

"At least eight gunmen. Pretty sure Rumlow is with them. He seems pissed."

"It's not like I killed him," Steve grumbles, and Bucky lets out a hysterical laugh. 

"Sorry." 

"We need a plan, Cap," Sam says. "I have stuff in the trunk, but I'd need a distraction."

"Would be hard without the shield," Steve muses, unfairly calm when there's bullets flying. "Natasha, do you have anything?"

"I don't exactly carry explosives in my underwire," she says, pulling out a package of gum.

"That would be impractical," Steve agrees, and they all watch as she kneads the white substance into a grape-sized ball. 

"This won't give us much," she says, pulling out a tiny metal tube.

"Aim for the two closest to us. As soon as it goes off, I'll engage. Sam, you get your suit, Natasha, get me my shield. Bucky, you stay as low as you can, be ready to run." Steve meets Bucky's eyes, and Bucky nods. "Head against the traffic, get on the other lane, try to stop someone and get away."

Bucky nods. Steve squeezes his wrist again. 

"Ready in three, two—"

Bucky feels the explosion. The car behind his back trembles, and suddenly the warmth of Steve's shoulder is gone. Bucky peers over the scratched door. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Sam kicking at the trunk of his ruined car, Natasha pulling the shield out, he's in a crouch ready to spring and run, and then— 

Something cold is pressed to the side of his head, a vice-like hand closes around his biceps and he's being hauled to his feet.

"Stand down!" the guy screams entirely too close to Bucky's ear. 

He watches Steve punch a guy out then turn on the balls of his feet, ready to go on fighting, until their eyes lock, and the fight… the fight remains, the fire of it, but contained, tamed. 

Don't, Bucky wants to say. Keep going. Don't let them. 

None of the words leave his mouth.

"Not here," the man holding him says. "Cuff them. Don't even think about trying anything, or I blow his brains out," he adds, and the gun digs into Bucky's skull deep enough to leave a mark on his brain.

Steve keeps looking at him as he's forced to his knees and his hands are encased in absurdly large handcuffs. The other goons prod Natasha and Sam towards the van, while Bucky is held in place until a nondescript car pulls up next to them and he's unceremoniously shoved inside. 

"Do not try anything."

Bucky stares at him. He's in a back seat of a car, flanked by two men with loaded weapons, his hands and knees are shaking, and his main life skill is being able to read between the lines. What the fuck does this guy think he's going to do? Quiz them to death?

"Get us home," the man holding him hostage says to the driver, and the car peels off with a squeal of tires.

He's still alive, Bucky tells himself. They are all alive. Steve will think of something. Yeah. Steve will definitely think of something.

The goon on his right looks at him out of the corner of his eye and grins nastily, and maybe it's that grin that nudges a memory: he's Runnow, or whatever. The guy Steve didn't kill in front of the VA. "Don't flatter yourself," he says.

"What?"

"You're only useful until we get rid of them."

"You still haven't."

"Couldn't exactly dig on an overpass, could I?"

Bucky takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. "Steve will stop you."

"Doubt it. They're coming on a nice convenient plot of ground no one will be digging up in a hurry. Soon as I get the call, we'll find one for you, too."

Bucky stares ahead. "You're underestimating him."

"He'd have let me shoot you if you were a soldier. Luckily for me, you're a civilian, a civilian he likes. He won't risk you. He's stupid like that."

Clearly, this is a man who has not read all of the reports he should have. With twenty million people on the line, Steve will let a civilian die. He'd be stupid not to.

The car takes a right, getting off the overpass, and into the shadows between buildings, unhurried, like they're looking for a convenient bodega. Rimnow is tapping his fingers against his thigh, until finally his hand comes up to his ear.

"Rumlow."

They are sitting close enough that Bucky can hear, just barely, the voice through the com unit. "They bolted!"

"WHAT?"

"One of ours is missing—Wuntch is not—must have been a plant!"

"Follow them!"

"—cut a hole in the—gone!"

Rumlow disconnects and the gun is back up, digging into Bucky's cheek. "Seems I was wrong, he doesn't like you all that much."

Bucky breathes, breathes through the mad hammering of his heart and the roaring of the fucking ocean in his ears. 

"Drive," Rumlow says, and the gun goes back down.

On the bright side, they've passed a whole bunch of convenient plots of land and he's still not dead, and that would be great, except the car is taking a left now, the Potomac shimmering between the trees, the Triskelion in the distance.

This is SHIELD headquarters. I'm going to see the Triskelion from the inside. I'm going to see the insides of SHIELD, Bucky thinks. Only… SHIELD is Hydra. They're taking me to Hydra headquarters. 

Fuck.

* * *

It takes less than fifteen minutes for the car to swerve from the main road and pause in front of the barrier with a full view of the triple towers. Bucky clenches his fists and tries to breathe.

"Sir," the guard says, looking into the back.

"He's being brought in for questioning," Rumlow says, flashing an ID, while his elbow digs painfully into Bucky's side. 

The guard nods and waves them through.

Rumlow grins, and though he is an objectively good looking man, it's still unsettling. There is no mirth in that smile, his eyes remain angry, and Bucky's got zero doubts he's only alive to be leveraged in case Steve shows up. "Here's what's going to happen. You'll get out of the car, and you will quietly go where pointed. You will stand in the corner, look harmless, and be quiet. Green?"

Fucking hell, they are terrified of what Steve will do, Bucky thinks as the car dips into the darkened garage access road. They have no idea what he's capable of, beyond kicking their asses. He can still flip this whole mess on its head. They want me to stop him.

I can't stop him, fleets through his head.

The lights flicker to life in front of them, illuminating just enough naked cement to drive another ten yards and nothing beyond. "Get us to the elevator," Rumlow tells the driver as the gun makes a reappearance.

The elevator door, brightly polished steel, slides open soundlessly the moment Rumlow approaches. Bucky steps in and behind him Rumlow checks the gun and looks up. "Command," he says. 

The elevator pings in response. "Unauthorized person present."

"Override, Rumlow, Brock. Authorization code: 173722."

"Override confirmed."

The elevator starts smoothly, but Bucky's stomach still makes the effort to stay in the garage. He clenches his fists and counts the dips in the wall in front of him, as they raise through the thick boundary between the cavernous underground and the surface. Slowly the naked concrete behind the glass gives way to more steel and then the outside is beyond the glass, the river and the trees, leaves and grass rustled by gentle winds. They keep climbing though, the elevator gliding up and up and up, until it comes to a stop and the doors slide open.

"Out." Rumlow gestures, and Bucky walks. 

They stop by a door, and Bucky stiffens. There's no plaque on it, no number, but it is the only door in the corridor, and it takes no genius to guess where they are. High command. Rumlow's back straightens, he's standing fully at attention, as he knocks twice and pushes the door open when the man inside calls "enter".

The view, Bucky has to admit, is great. Most of the wall is taken by a window, showing a breathtaking vista of the Potomac and DC. The office itself is not that impressive: the decor is simple, matches the rest of the building; all concrete and glass. There's simplicity in it, the kind that speaks of money above all else. There's no maps, very few electronics; this is not a room where when something is shown, it is very deliberate.

Bucky almost misses the man sitting on the couch, leafing through a selection of papers.

"Dr. Barnes," Secretary Pierce says. He's not even looking at them, choosing instead to focus on the documents in front of him. Bucky hates himself a little, but he's willing to bet if there was a huge explosion the man wouldn't be looking at that, either.

"Secretary Pierce," he responds.

"Quiet," Rumlow hisses, and elbows Bucky sharply.

"Oh no, let him speak." 

"I don't think I have anything else to say."

Pierce raises his head and smiles. "I enjoy your writing style. It's pointed, well balanced with subtle humor, the analysis is spot on. Well done."

Bucky blinks. "Oh. Thank you." To think that three days ago Bucky would have given up a chance at tenure to learn that Alexander Pierce not only knew who he was, but had actually read a paper of his, nevermind found it insightful.

"You've caused us a substantial amount of grief over the past few days." Pierce folds his papers back into their folder and stands. It's weird how much he resembles Steve, not just physically but in stance and bearing. He's… striking. Magnetic.

"You killed my friend," Bucky says, shaking himself out of the spell.

"I am sorry about that," Pierce says easily. "Loss of life is always unfortunate."

"Doesn't seem so, considering what you're up to now."

Pierce's eyebrow inches up over the frame of his glasses, though he still doesn't look like a man surprised. "Oh, you've heard?"

Bucky shrugs.

"You study politics. Surely you understand a war requires sacrifices."

"We're not at war."

"Quaint. The world is always at war. What we do today will end it, once and for all."

"No, it won't," Bucky says, fists clenched. "All that will get you is more people trying to fight you."

"There will be chaos, yes, but it will be brief, and order will follow. With the helicarriers in the air, at last, the world will be forced to fall in line. We will put an end to war, to terrorism, to all these little scuffles that make life so… unpredictable."

"Stop terrorism via mass murder, that's a new one," Bucky mutters, earning a punch to the shoulder. 

"What was that?"

"You push the world into chaos, there's no telling what ends up on top. Could be you, could be someone else. What I do know is that whoever you don't kill, will show up at your doorstep eventually."

"We're prepared for this. It may take time, but humanity will accept peace, in the end."

"Not in your lifetime."

"Probably not even in yours, and you are still very young," Pierce says, coming too stand a little too close to comfort. "But that is the price of wanting peace. We have a responsibility to deliver it, even when the effort might outlive us." Bucky's spine locks up, just full on pulls every lever inserts every bolt, keeping him straight, stopping his feet from moving, no matter how much he wants to take a step back. "The push we give the world today will make the acceptance a little easier. And it will come."

"It won't," Bucky says with conviction, though his voice trembles. "It never will, not when pushed."

Pierce smiles. He's got a pleasant smile, Bucky thinks, a little dazed. His whole ambience exudes pleasantness, from the suit, the neat yet not completely controlled hairdo, the appearance of wizened sage and calculated movements. His demeanor puts people at ease, makes them trust him, and he is very good at what he does. If Bucky didn't know what he knows… 

"I'd invite you to reconsider your stance."

"On what, mass murder?"

"You are on the list," Pierce says casually. "You will not live long enough to appreciate the full impact of Insight. Unless you reconsider."

Bucky blinks, and he's fairly sure he can also hear Rumlow blinking in surprise. 

"Are you—are you asking me to join Hydra?"

"You're a bright young man. You have no practical training, and yet you managed to evade our top team long enough to make contact with Captain America. I'm sure we could find a use for you."

Alexander Pierce thinks highly of me, Bucky thinks in a daze. Alexander Pierce is offering me a job. 

At Hydra, the back of his mind reminds him. Well, yes, obviously this is not an offer Bucky is considering, but still. In purely abstract terms, he is very flattered.

"I have to decline," he says, surprised when his voice comes out perfectly even.

"Are you sure? This is a one-time offer only."

"I'm sure. Thank you. But no."

"Well, I'm disappointed." Pierce takes a long minute to stop looking at him. "Rumlow – put him in the control room. Make sure he attracts no attention and stays quiet. The council will be here soon."

"Yes, sir."

"Goodbye, Dr. Barnes."

Bucky scrambles to keep pace with Rumlow, who is dragging him along the corridor at a break-neck pace, back into the elevator and through the whoosh of the floor dropping from underneath their feet, until he is shoved into a locker room.

"Take a shower."

He wasn't expecting that. A thought of protest rises in his head, but Rumlow doesn't seem to be in a mood for sas and he's carrying at least two huge guns, so Bucky takes a quick shower, combs his hair when prompted, ties it back, then puts on a nice suit Rumlow shoves at him.

"You will stand in the corner and pretend you're Pierce's PA. You will not speak starting now," he says as he sticks something just behind Bucky's ear, something that pinches and burns for a few seconds, "Or this," he waves a badge he then affixes to Bucky's lapel, "will burn a hole right through your torso. Pierce will also have a trigger, in case you try to be clever. Understood?"

Bucky swallows and nods. 

Rumlow grins and pats his cheek. "Good boy."

He gestures towards the door and Bucky goes, heart slamming a beat straight out of an electro-cover of an Adele ballad. He's directed to a spacious room, not unlike Pierce's office, where he's put in front of the computer and told to feign work.

He blinks. A computer! With an established internet connection!

"If you can log in, by all means," Rumlow tells him, displaying all of his teeth as he does, which makes him look not so much frightening, as bypassing the fright and going straight for the emotional jugular. Bucky's brain is flooded with the fear hormones, because there is no light in this man's eyes, none whatsoever: he is just teeth and nastiness.

He sits down and puts his hands on the keyboard.

He's so busy trying to stave off the heart attack he knows it's coming – there's no way his heart can pump out the adrenaline at this pace and not give out eventually – that he completely misses Pierce walking in with five people in tow: the council. The woman of the group catches his eye briefly and nods in acknowledgement, which he cannot help but return. He looks back at the screen, heart pumping, ready for Pierce to make the pitch to the council members, which is when the speakers come on.

"Attention all SHIELD agents," says the disembodied voice of Captain America. "This is Steve Rogers. You've heard a lot about me over the last few days. Some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it's time you know the truth. SHIELD is not what we thought it was. It has been taken over by Hydra. Alexander Pierce is their leader. The STRIKE and Insight crew are Hydra as well. We don't know how many more, but I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you. They almost have what they want: absolute control. They shot Nick Fury, and it won't end there. If you launch those helicarriers today, Hydra will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way." 

Bucky lifts his head from behind the computer, looks at Pierce and then at each of the council members in turn. They each look to the ceiling, in shock, and he grins.

"They must be stopped," Steve continues gravely. "I know I'm asking a lot. The price of freedom is high; it always has been. But it's a price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not."

Pierce looks at Rumlow, whose hand goes up to his ear. He nods and rushes out of the room, while Bucky struggles to breathe. It's going to be fine. Steve is here. He looks at the computer screen, folds his hands across his chest, and breathes, but then a commotion catches his attention: the councilwoman is throwing a man over her shoulder, and overall kicking major ass, and then she's—peeling her face off to reveal Natasha.

It's over, Bucky things giddily. They did it!

Natasha nudges him away from the computer, with a muttered "it's gonna be okay," and proceeds to bulldoze through the lock screens and password demands, until there is one final lock to get through, and then a helicopter appears on the landing outside and Nick Fury steps out, leather coat and all.

"Are you ready for the world to see you as you really are?" Pierce asks of Natasha as she prepares to open the floodgates that would make SHIELD instantly transparent to the world. 

"Are you?" she answers, and then looks at Bucky. "They have to come down," she adds under her breath. "We can't catch them all… so we make sure they have no way to hide."

He nods.

"Are you okay?"

He shrugs, one of his hands goes to the nub embedded in the skin behind his ear.

"Hang on, we'll fix it," Natasha says, fingers flying on the keyboard.

Then, predictably, it all goes to shit. Pierce triggers the ID card on one of the council people, who goes down in a smokeshow, pulls out a gun out of nowhere and, one hand on the trigger device, orders Bucky outside.

There's a helicopter waiting, though even to Bucky's inexpert eye it looks a lot different than the one Fury arrived in. When the hell did they manage to swap the helicopters?

"Move," Pierce says, closing the door behind him. 

The propeller turns, swiping the air molecules and anything lighter than a brick along it into a stable vortex. Bucky shields his eyes with one hand, clenches it into fists when he feels the press of a gun at his back.

"Get in," Pierce says.

Bucky climbs into the helicopter.

It's several feet off the ground when the door explodes in a shower of glass shards and Steve explodes onto the roof, shield at the ready. Bucky's heart does a painful triple somersault in his chest, but Pierce smiles smugly at him, though really? Any politician should know that amount of raw fury shouldn't show on your face.

Natasha is holding a very big gun, aimed at the helicopter, Fury hovering behind her, but Steve is holding up his hand. 

They can't shoot them down, Bucky realizes, without killing him, Pierce and the pilot. 

It's probably not Pierce or the pilot that are causing the dilemma.

Pierce might not be all Hydra's got, but if he gets away, it's not certain he's going to be indicted for this. Unless he's been stupid enough to actually sign everything with his own name, he would wiggle out of… most of the charges. It would be his word against theirs. 

And that's assuming he'll be caught.

There must be a contingency plan. The pilot is pulling up maps. They have a place they are going to, they must have planned for this. You don't survive inside an intelligence agency for as long as they did without a contingency plan.

Even if two heads take place of this one, it has to be better than letting this one get away. Two heads will, inevitably, war with one another.

They need the hostage to get away, and not much longer after that.

Bucky meets Steve's eyes. They are still close enough that he can see the fury in his face.

Well, this ought to make him smile, at least, he thinks, pulls the door handle and dives out of the helicopter.

Eventually, he will smile.

It feels like slipping; his foot loses contact with the machine and he's in freefall, hundreds of feet from the ground. A wave of heat strikes him, the glare of the sun making it impossible to see the source. The concrete below blurs with the green of the trees, the faint April breeze replaced with a violent rush of all the air being squeezed out of the rapidly shrinking space between him and the pavement. His arm is on fire, but that's okay. 

It won't last long.

A shadow passes across the sun, Bucky's body jerks sharply and he blacks out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do not panic! There is an epilogue!


	4. The results

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world is still a mess, but Steve just might be okay with it.

The sunshine tries its hardest, but even in mid-May the seabreeze is the dominant sensation. Steve takes a deep breath. Salty, with a hint of seaweed. No surprise, since he can see the beach from here, between the trees. He leaves the bike beneath the overhanging canopy of a couple of old pines and follows the narrow path through the cove. At the end of the path, just as Natasha promised, there is a small cottage. The door is locked, sensibly, but as he made a point of triggering at least three proximity alerts, he should not be arriving unexpectedly.

Also, he called ahead.

The door opens, and there's Bucky, a grin lighting up his sea-grey eyes. "Steve!"

His face is almost healed, the gash across his cheek now only a pale pink stripe, but his left arm is still in a sling. Steve smiles back, nonetheless. "Hi Bucky. How's it going?"

"I really hope the broadband I have is as protected as Natasha promised, because it turns out I have downloaded some deeply questionable materials. I think some might qualify me for treason."

"Pretty sure that ship has sailed."

"Oh, well, you know. What's a little treason in good company." He moves away from the door, letting Steve in, turns the lock and flicks a couple of buttons on the panel hidden in a nook by the frame, re-arming the proximity alerts.

The cottage is, upon first glance, both unremarkable and amazing. It's smaller than Steve's DC apartment and all the furniture is at least three decades old, but the kitchen appliances gleam, and Steve counts no less than five booby traps, discreetly hidden among tchotchkes and in-built design pieces. At the same time someone took the time to make sure it feels cozy and lived-in: there's a couch facing the wide windows, covered with a pile of mismatched blankets, thrown together by a careless hand, a large TV and a stone fireplace. 

One of the walls is already covered by scraps of paper, printouts and colorful threads, the selection very clearly put together by Bucky. There's a compelling asymmetry to the placement of the threads: the irresistibly rainbow lines crisscross and overlap, forming a web of patterns in the chaos.

"You want coffee? Milk?"

"Yes, to both. And sugar." Steve traces the red threads: it links an excerpt from the bio of Alexander Pierce and Peggy Carter with a SHIELD deputy who was in charge of transferring Zola into the computer. A parallel purple line takes him around the portrait of Captain America, and from there to the article about the fall of SHIELD and several subsequent crises.

Over in the kitchen the water flows and then the hum of the coffee machine picks up. "I love this machine," Bucky says. "It grinds the beans and all. Best coffee I've ever had."

"How do you get beans out here?"

"There's a ten year supply of coffee beans in the pantry, actually." Bucky cuts off the water flow, adds a splash of milk and a spoonful of sugar, then hands Steve the mug.

"How's the arm?" Steve asks, the first real chance he has had since the Triskelion. The scene keeps replaying itself across Steve's mind even now: the helicopter moving steadily away, Bucky looking back at him, pale and frightened, beyond his reach. Pierce would have gotten away and Steve would have let him, had Bucky not opened that door and jumped, paralysing Steve where he stood, but not Natasha. No, Natasha hefted the gun and blew Pierce all the way to hell.

Thankfully Sam was close enough to snatch Bucky out of the air, but not before the shrapnel from the exploding helicopter, and some flaming fuel, caught up to him.

"Still hurts, but I'm doing the therapy exercises," Bucky says lightly. "The shrapnel wound is healing well, but with the burns it's probably not going to recover fully."

"I'm sorry."

"Hey, I'm just an academic. I don't need both arms to do my work, and I'm told my face makes up for the arm looking like crap." He wiggles his fingers, and winces immediately afterwards. "Don't worry about it."

"Did Sam visit?" Steve asks, mainly to change the subject. He knows Sam did. "That sounds like something he would say."

"Yeah, he was here two weeks ago."

Steve huffs out a laugh. "He's got an excellent bedside manner." 

"Yeah. Hey," Bucky says quietly. "Listen – I wanted to apologize."

Steve blinks. "What do you mean?"

"Back at Sam's house, I said Hydra survived because you delivered Zola to SSR."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry. It wasn't your fault."

Steve waits, but Bucky says nothing else, just keeps looking at him earnestly. "That's it? You're not going to tell me you didn't mean it?"

Bucky frowns. "Why would I tell you that?"

"You accused me of helping Hydra survive."

"I did no such thing!" 

"Isn't that what you just said?"

"I said you delivered him to people who help Hydra survive. You delivering him was not a mistake. What the SSR did with him after, that's not on you."

"I could have shot him on the spot and he would have deserved it. I lost a good man on that mission."

"It's a good thing you didn't shoot him," Bucky says. "That was the right thing to do."

"Didn't seem to make anything better. It let them survive, you were not wrong about that."

"Bullshit," Bucky says hotly. "You took him out of the game. You changed the course of the war. That saved lives. That's plenty."

"It's not good enough."

"What do you want, then, to rule supreme?" Bucky asks. Steve blinks at him. "I don't know how else you plan to make the world your bitch. Dictatorship works, if the guy in charge is committed to actually doing things right. Could be good for everyone."

"I never—" 

"How else would you make sure everyone else does the right thing?"

Steve looks down, smiling all of sudden. "Guess that's a pipe dream."

"Have you met people? C'mon. People suck."

"You don't," Steve says softly, peering up through his eyelashes.

"Eh, well. I have my problems."

"Oh yeah, definitely."

"Hey!"

Steve can't help but laugh. Bucky's outraged face is the stuff that would make only the most fragile of five-year-olds tremble.

"Can I get you a cup of coffee?" he asks, only a little breathlessly. 

Bucky blinks at him. "We have—" His face goes red. "Oh. Is this—are you—"

"I saw the rainbow pin on your backpack. I know at least you're batting for my team."

"Yeah, I mean, obviously. Or not so obviously, I could just be an ally."

"Are you?"

"No," Bucky replies, still flushed. "I'd like that coffee."

"Yeah?" Steve grins. He reaches out, almost without thinking, and finds to his delight that Bucky's hand is waiting for him, and their fingers intertwine. "Might be a while before I can take you out for dinner properly."

"We'll figure something out. The groceries are delivered to the decoy cottage once a week."

"You have no problem hauling them in?" Steve asks, nodding towards Bucky's left arm. It seemed like the best course of action to hide him away, and he trusts Natasha with the security of the cabin, but Bucky's hurt, and they left him to fend for himself. He's capable, of course he is, but still, he's mostly alone here, isolated… 

But Bucky waves his concerns away. "I have this little red cart, don't laugh. It's very useful."

"Wouldn't dream of laughing," Steve says, insincerely. 

"Yeah, well, I'm not going to show it to you."

"I'm staying the week. I'm pretty sure I'm going to see."

"You apparently eat a tonne, so the next delivery will be a two-man job."

"I'm sure the little red cart will come in handy." 

Bucky laughs, and when the laughter dissipates it leaves behind a smile. Steve smiles back, and lets his fingers twitch, just enough that his palm curls around Bucky's. This will be a good week, and hell, with luck it will be a good month, too.

Maybe, he thinks, it will even be something more.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> Find the author on [Tumblr](https://keire-ke.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/keire_ke).
> 
> Find the artist on [Tumblr](https://midnightbikeride.tumblr.com/).


End file.
